Thursday

Nov 29, 2018 at 9:45 AM

If you’re not familiar with the name Ben Gailing, it could be because you’re not old enough, you were never a fan of variety radio shows, or you don’t speak Yiddish. Gailing, who died in 1999 at the age of 100, was a special sort of Boston radio personality. His weekly program, the “Yiddish Radio Show,” featuring songs and skits and jokes and editorials – all in Yiddish – ran in Boston, initially on WDLW, on Sunday mornings from 1932 till 1999.

In honor of what would have been Gailing’s 120th birthday, Temple Beth Israel in Waltham in hosting “Yiddish Radio Lives!”, a musical celebration presented by Hankus Netsky’s Hebrew National Salvage, on Dec. 2.

Netsky, a musician, composer, ethnomusicologist, co-chair of the Contemporary Improvisation Department at New England Conservatory, and founder of the Klezmer Conservatory Band, produced Gailing’s show for its final 15 years. The production he’s assembling for Temple Beth Israel, filled with pieces from Yiddish theater, klezmer dance tunes, Yiddish folk songs, and lots more, will feature Netsky on piano, violinist Abigale Reisman, vocalists Miryem-Khaye Seigel and Henry Carrey, and a number of special guests.

“I’m inviting a woman who used to play classical piano on Ben’s show,” said Netsky, a Newton resident. “She’s close to 100 and still a fantastic pianist. I also have the granddaughter of someone who used to read poetry on his show. Miryem-Khaye Seigel is probably the most active Yiddish performer in New York. She’ll be in the role of Ben Gailing, and will be doing his classic repertoire that either he wrote or he adapted, or his impersonations of the great stars of the Yiddish theater. She’s an incredibly funny actress and singer, like a reincarnation of Molly Picon.”

Netsky is steeped in all sorts of music. A Philadelphia native, he moved to Boston when Gunther Schuller, then president of New England Conservatory, and Webster Lewis, then head of Community Services at NEC, recruited him after seeing him perform at a rehearsal for Philadelphia’s All-City Jazz Band.

“Actually, my mother made me go to a liberal arts school for one year first,” he said. “She felt that I needed to try the academic thing along with the music. So, I went to Carnegie Mellon, but by the next October I transferred to New England Conservatory.

“I got to study with real forces in music there: Jaki Byard, George Russell, Ran Blake. While I was still an undergraduate, I got to be kind of an assistant teacher for Ran Blake. When I was about to graduate, I planned to go to Columbia University to study composition for my master's. But Gunther Schuller said to me, ‘If you stay here for your master's, when you graduate, you’ll have a job.’ And I’ve now been on the faculty for over 40 years.”

Besides his continuing work with the Klezmer Conservatory Band, which he started in 1980, Netsky runs a variety of musical workshops every summer, ranging from “global musicians for Silk Road to teaching cantors in the Jewish Renewal movement how to sound Jewish.” He also teaches a class on Eastern European Jewish Music each summer at McGill University, plays in numerous local duos and, throughout the year, tours as saxophonist and pianist with Itzhak Perlman’s show “In the Fiddler’s House.”

Netsky’s umbrella organization Hebrew National Salvage, of which “Yiddish Radio Lives!” is a part, encompasses, in his words, “all of my different projects that involve rescuing extraordinary Jewish musical treasures that have been otherwise neglected, discarded, or overlooked.

“With this one,” he added, “we’re trying to capture the spirit of the Ben Gailing show at two different intervals. So, we’re thinking of doing two different sets: one from 1932 and one from 1999. It’ll be very lively.”

“Yiddish Radio Lives! A Musical Tribute to Ben Gailing at 120” takes place at Temple Beth Israel in Waltham on Dec. 2 at 1 p.m. Tickets: $20; temple members & students, $15. Info: 781-894-5146 or http://tbiwaltham.org.